Newspapers
The American Antiquarian Society is this nation's chief
repository for early American newspapers, and a significant portion
of research done at the Society draws upon the Society's
collection. The primary goal for the collection is to acquire,
preserve, and make available for research newspapers published in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States,
Canada, and the English-speaking West Indies. To this end, the
Society adds, through gift and purchase, an average of 3,000 issues
a year to its holdings. Building on Isaiah Thomas's gift in 1812
of 382 titles in 551 volumes, the Society has accumulated over
15,000 newspaper titles in 20,000 volumes. Today, AAS has more
than two million issues on five miles of shelving. The collection
is preserved in protective folders and boxes in a climate-
controlled environment. In 1973, to assure the preservation and
usefulness of its newspaper holdings, the Society established the
position of curator of newspapers and serials.
The collection contains newspapers from all fifty states and
the District of Columbia, the Canadian provinces, the West Indies,
and Great Britain. British newspapers are retained through the
Revolutionary War period.
The Newspaper Cataloging Manual of the Library of Congress
defines a newspaper as a serial publication designed to be a
primary source of written information on current events connected
with public affairs, either local, national, or international, not
limited to a specific subject matter. The Society, however,
collects every kind of newspaper, those that fit the definition
strictly, those that are really periodicals in newspaper format,
such as college, literary, religious, or temperance newspapers, and
those that do not seem to fit either category, including
advertising, campaign, church fair, or price-current newspapers.
Geographically the collection encompasses most areas on the North
American continent and the nearby islands.
Wallpaper newspapers form an unusual group in the Society's
holdings. These were newspapers printed on the obverse of
wallpaper samples because of the paper shortage in the southern
states during the Civil War. The Society has three copies, each on
different wallpaper, of the most famous of these newspapers, the Daily
Citizen from Vicksburg, Mississippi, for July 2 and 4,
1863. It holds twenty-two of the thirty-two titles listed by
Clarence Brigham in his essay on the subject in Bibliographical
Essays: A tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, Mass., 1924).
The newspaper collection of the Society has grown and continues
to grow through purchases, particularly of pre-1821 issues
and of issues from the western states for which its holdings are
weak, as well as through gifts from individuals and from institutions.
Many of the Louisiana newspapers came from Edward Larocque
Tinker, while Waldo Lincoln brought together the West Indian
issues. The Society's Rowell collection was assembled over a
number of years. G.P. Rowell, noted for his annual newspaper
directories, organized an exhibition of all extant newspapers in
the United States for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in
1876. Discards from the exhibition found their way into the col-
lections of the Chicago Historical Society. In 1915, that Society
donated the issues from the eastern states to AAS, and in 1974 it
completed the gift with all its Rowell newspapers except for those
from Illinois and Indiana. After World War II, New England
institutions sent hundreds of newspapers to the Society. Beginning
in 1973, the Society has from time to time circulated to historical
societies, public libraries, and academic institutions a request
for those newspapers they could not maintain.
Providing bibliographical control of and access to its
research materials has been a major activity of the Society
throughout its history. This has been as true for newspapers as
for any other group of materials, from Thomas's catalogue of his
gift to the participation by AAS in the United States Newspaper
Program, underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Because the collections of the Society are shelved in areas
closed to the public, researchers gain access to them through the
card catalogue, bibliographical tools, and terminals linked to
national databases. The catalogue provides holdings information
rather than bibliographical descriptions. It is divided into pre-
1821 and post-1820 sections, with each section arranged
alphabetically by state, town, and title. The first section contains
issue-by-issue records of the Society's early holdings. A major
project in process is the collating of the post-1820 newspapers to
provide similar information for the second section of the
catalogue. Because of new acquisitions and cataloging, the card
catalogue will remain the most up-to-date guide to the Society's
holdings.
As a participant in the United States Newspaper Program, the
Society entered bibliographical and holdings records for 14,000 of
its pre-1877 American titles into the national database, OCLC.
With the completion of this project, AAS continues to have access
to these records through RLIN.
The lack of indexes to early American newspapers often hampers
research. Brigham's Bibliography contains a title index and is
complemented by Edward Connery Lathem's Chronological Tables of
American Newspapers, 1690-1820, (Worcester, 1972). Avis G.
Clark's typescript "An Alphabetical Index to the Titles in American
Newspapers, 1821-1936" is a useful tool for nineteenth-century
research. The few subject indexes to eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century newspapers include Lester Cappon's Virginia Gazette Index
(Williamsburg, Virginia, 1930) and the WPA index to the Hampshire
Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts (Boston, Mass., 1939). In
general, newspaper indexes are genealogical in nature, such as the
Index of Obituaries in Boston Newspapers, 1704-1800, compiled by
the Boston Athenaeum (Boston, 1968) and the "Index to Marriages and
Deaths in the Columbian Centinel," a typescript at the Society.
Indexes in the Society's own collections are listed in the
"Checklist of Newspaper Indexes in the American Antiquarian
Society."
Because the Society's primary interest is in original
materials, it seldom purchases newspapers on microfilm, and films
titles from its own collection only on request from a patron. As
part of its cooperation with Readex Microprint Corporation,
however, the Society has acquired a complete set of the Readex
Early American Newspaper Series on microcard and microfilm. The
small collection of microfilm accumulated through the years
includes two Worcester titles, The Massachusetts Spy, 1821-1904,
and The Aegis, 1801-97. To preserve originals, AAS has also
acquired facsimile reprints of titles such as The Boston News-
Letter, The Newport Mercury, and The New-York Gazette, among
others.
Although the newspaper collection of the Society is heavily
used, historians and researchers have yet to realize its full
potential. As Clarence Brigham noted in his Bibliography and
History of American Newspapers, "If all the printed sources of
history for a certain century or decade had to be destroyed to save
one, that which could be chosen with the greatest value to
posterity would be a file of an important newspaper."
- Joyce A. Tracy, former Curator of Newspapers and
Periodicals; updated by Vincent Golden, Curator of Newspapers and
Periodicals
|
A wallpaper newspaper
Le courrier des opelousas
A selection of newspapers
Boston Newsletter
|
